The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

by Graeme Davis

  That others were making serious attempts to write high quality “crime fiction” may have impressed the young Arthur Conan Doyle, but it was far from his chosen field. It must be remembered that he did not return to Sherlock Holmes after selling A Study in Scarlet; instead, devoting himself to the historical novel Micah Clarke. The Sign of the Four was an interruption of his serious work on the great historical novel The White Company, and even while the first six of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were appearing, he published Beyond the City, a tale of suburban life, and dove into his long historical novel The Refugees. Conan Doyle finished writing the last of The Memoirs tales in early 1893 and put Holmes aside—for good, or so he planned.‡‡‡‡

  Willard Wright, the author of the enormously successful Philo Vance mysteries that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, famously spent two years of convalescence reading widely in crime fiction before setting out to make his fortune as a popular writer.§§§§ Conan Doyle did not. In his ode to beloved books, Through the Magic Door—based on essays he wrote in 1894, shortly after the success of Sherlock Holmes—he mentions only two of the authors discussed here, Poe and Stevenson. In neither case does he mention their stories of detection. Conan Doyle’s eye was on what he believed to be greater prizes: He sought to be known for his historical fiction and his literary work. Crime fiction was only one of many possible paths to the financial success he sought, with the aim of providing himself the freedom to write books that mattered (in his estimation). Every bit of evidence suggests he read narrowly, if at all, in the genre when he was young and had little interest in crafting crime fiction.¶¶¶¶ Only the serendipitous thought of his old teacher Joseph Bell appears to have lead him to the path to becoming the greatest writer of detective tales ever to put pen to paper.

  * A slightly modified version of this essay appears in the Winter 2018 issue of the Baker Street Journal.

  † At thirteen. Thomas Mayne Reid (1818–1883) was a Scottish-Irish-American writer of dozens of adventure tales, usually set in exotic locations; his books were popular with children in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Theodore Roosevelt credited him as an influence on his interests.

  ‡ It appeared anonymously in Chambers’s Journal, No. 819 (6 Sep. 1879), pp. 568–572.

  § It first appeared in the September 1882 issue of London Society, signed “A. Conan Doyle.”

  ¶ Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, London: Hodder and Stoughton, p. 74.

  # Conan Doyle, p. 75.

  ** These were, respectively, The History of Bel and The History of Susanna, The Story of Hercules and Cacus, and The Story of Rhampsinitus.

  †† For example, Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote the underappreciated multi-genre novel Pelham, first published in 1828, in the last quarter of which the eponymous protagonist takes up sleuthing to solve a murder.

  ‡‡ In A Study in Scarlet, after Watson remarks Holmes reminds him of Dupin, Holmes replies, “‘No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. . . . Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.’”

  §§ The book sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.

  ¶¶ Early popular American titles include The Old Sleuth, Butts the Boy Detective, and, of course, countless Sexton Blake and Nick Carter stories.

  ## The story was first published in eight parts in 1862–1863 in Once a Week Magazine. It was published as a single volume in 1865 by Saunders, Otley & Co. Although the author’s true identity was not revealed during his lifetime, Charles Warren Adams (1853–1903), the publisher of the magazine who wrote several other pseudonymous works that appeared in the magazine, is the likeliest candidate.

  *** The book first appeared in 1866, published in New York by Beadle & Co. It is doubtful that it had much circulation in England.

  ††† The book was published under this title in 1860, revised and shortened as The Trail of the Serpent in 1861, serialized in the revised form in 1864, and thereafter published in numerous editions. Braddon, writing in 1893, expressed doubt that a single copy of the original book had been sold. The revised edition did quite well, however, as Braddon’s reputation grew.

  ‡‡‡ Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, New York, Viking, 1981, p. 52.

  §§§ Ellery Queen, Queen’s Quorum, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951, p. 14, thought the London edition was “probably pirated, the text lifted from ‘Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal’ and ‘some of our American Magazines.’”

  ¶¶¶ Warren Warner and Gustavas Sharp were both pseudonyms of Samuel Warren, a barrister with Edinburgh medical training. He also wrote Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1832) and Leaves from the Diary of a Law Clerk (1857). Andrew Lycett asserts that Conan Doyle was familiar with his work. (Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, p. 110). The Barrister book featured a pair of attorneys named Ferret and Sharpe, while the Attorney book is written in the first person by Mr. Sharp, whose partner is Mr. Flint. These are names that Doyle made fun of: “I still possess the leaf of a notebook with various alternative names [for Sherlock Holmes],” he wrote in Memories and Adventures. “One rebelled against the elementary art which give some inkling of character in the name, and creates Mr. Sharps or Mr. Ferrets.” (p. 75) This jest certainly suggests that he was familiar with Warren’s work.

  ### The last was by William C. Honeyman (1845–1919), a Scottish violinist and orchestra leader, who wrote a long series of fictional reminiscences of a “city detective” as well as a number of books on the violin. It is certainly tempting to think that Conan Doyle was familiar with the man or his work.

  **** Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to Conan Doyle, 5 April 1893.

  †††† Muddock probably eventually met Conan Doyle, for Muddock’s daughter Dorothy married Herbert Greenhough Smith, Conan Doyle’s editor at The Strand, in 1900 (though the wedding took place in the first quarter of the year, while Conan Doyle was in South Africa). However, Muddock mentions none of Dorothy, Herbert, or Conan Doyle in his 1907 autobiography Pages from an Adventurous Life, and Doyle does not mention Muddock in his autobiography.

  ‡‡‡‡ One wonders whether Doyle ever discussed crime fiction with his friend Israel Zangwill, who published his mystery novel The Big Bow Mystery (generally regarded as the first “locked-room” mystery) in 1892, just as Conan Doyle was concluding the first Holmes tales. That they discussed art and writing is apparent from Doyle’s June 1894 “Before My Bookcase” essay in which he mentions that Zangwill admonished him that “mere horror was not art.”

  §§§§ Wright also edited The Great Detective Stories: A Chronological Anthology, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927, and provided an extensive and learned introduction.

  ¶¶¶¶ Later in his career, Conan Doyle amassed a substantial collection of “true crime” writing, much of it acquired in 1911 from the collection of W. S. Gilbert. The collection is discussed in detail by Walter Klinefelter, in his essay “The Conan Doyle Crime Library,” reprinted in Klinefelter’s Origins of Sherlock Holmes (1983). Klinefelter observes that of the eighty items catalogued, only six books have publication dates before 1911 and could have been used as source material. However, Klinefelter concludes, “[I]f Conan Doyle did draw on them for anything prior to the stories of the ‘Case-Book,’ it could not have been of any great moment.” Margalit Fox, in her excellent Conan Doyle for the Defense (New York: Random House, 2018), states: “Long an avid reader of detective fiction, Conan Doyle was also deeply interested in true crime.” (p. 144) While it is evident from his writings after the turn of the century that the latter part of this statement is true, sadly there is no evidence of the former part, except his expressed admiration of Poe and Gaboriau.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Graeme Davis<
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  Coal-smoke and fog wreathe the city, dampening the clop and rattle of hansom cabs in the street. A cry rings out; a body has been discovered. The family is distraught; the police are baffled. Only one detective can solve the case and bring the killer to justice: a brilliant thinker, a master of science, an eccentric genius, a detective named . . .

  C Auguste Dupin, Martin Hewitt, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Doctor John Thorndyke, Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk, Professor Craig Kennedy, Max Carrados, or one of many other detectives in the mystery story’s first golden age.

  Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus—but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” anticipated Holmes’s deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his “tales of ratiocination.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’s adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe—and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier.

  Although detective fiction did not emerge as a genre in the English language until the mid-nineteenth century, its roots run deep. The Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders is regarded by some as an ancestor of the detective story, with Daniel as the detective. The story of “The Three Apples” in The Thousand and One Nights faces its protagonist, the vizier Ja’far, with a murder to solve, although he does little in the way of actual detection. Song Dynasty China (960–1279) saw the birth of gong’an (“legal fiction”), a genre of plays and puppet shows featuring a magistrate or other government official. By the succeeding Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), the form had expanded into novels: the adventures of some celebrated gong’an detectives, such as Judge Bao and Judge Dee, may still be found in print today.

  In Europe, the novel emerged as a literary form in the eighteenth century, and fictional genres began to develop as readers found they liked one type of story or another. Stories involving crimes and feats of analysis began to appear across Europe from the middle of the century, and E. T. A. Hoffman’s novella Mademoiselle de Scudéri, widely regarded as the first true detective story in European literature, was published in 1819.

  While Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is often hailed as the first detective story in English, it is not without antecedents. Published in 1793, William Godwin’s three-volume novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams shows how the legal system of the day could fail; its protagonist solves a murder, but detection takes a back seat to political and social commentary as he is framed by the aristocratic culprit and forced to live on the run. “The Secret Cell,” by Poe’s publisher William Evans Burton—with which this collection begins—appeared in the September 1837 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine, of which Poe became an editor two years later. By the time “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published, Burton had fired Poe and the two were bitter enemies. Even if he had been inspired by Burton’s story, Poe would not have admitted it—and in any case, Burton’s detective was a policeman rather than an amateur genius, and was remarkable only for his dogged persistence and familiarity with London’s underworld.

  If “Rue Morgue” was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Two books by Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)—are often given that honor, with the latter showing many of the features that came to identify the genre: a locked-room murder in an English country house; bungling local detectives outmatched by a brilliant amateur detective; a large cast of suspects and a plethora of red herrings; and a final twist before the truth is revealed. Others point to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and others still to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.” Then there is The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), a melodrama translated from a French original, Léonard by Édouard Brisbarre and Eugène Nus, by dramatist Tom Taylor—best known today for Our American Cousin, the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated.

  The debate about the first detective novel may never be settled, but what is certain—and certainly more interesting—is to note just how popular detective fiction had become by the early 1860s, both with the reading public and with writers from widely differing backgrounds. In the words of a contemporary music-hall song, there was a lot of it about.

  This burst of detective fiction coincided neatly with the boyhood of Arthur Conan Doyle. While he publicly acknowledged the contributions of Poe and Gaboriau in the creation of Sherlock Holmes, he can hardly have failed to read, and be influenced by, other works in the developing genre of detective fiction.

  Between 1887 and 1927, Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, and the success of the great detective brought both imitators and competitors. Doyle killed Holmes in “The Final Problem” (1893), beginning a nine-year hiatus in which many other fictional detectives tried to fill his shoes. The first—appearing in The Strand just three months later—was Martin Hewitt, another master of deduction; others followed, and in 1898, Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung published the first adventures of A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief.

  Holmes’s return in The Hound of the Baskervilles only seemed to intensify the reading public’s thirst, and no fictional detective was entirely free of his influence. There was Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, “The Thinking Machine;” Doctor John Evelyn Thorndyke, a prototypical forensic scientist; Professor Craig Kennedy, scientist and gadgeteer; and Duckworth Drew of the Foreign Office, who combined the qualities of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

  As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages—of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cosy” murders in Britain—the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other—but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured in these pages.

  THE SECRET CELL

  by William Evans Burton

  1837

  While Edgar Allan Poe is often credited with the creation of the first fictional detective in the person of C. Auguste Dupin—one of whose adventures can be found later in this volume—he is not unchallenged in this claim. “The Secret Cell” was published four years before Dupin’s debut in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and it is even possible that Burton’s tale inspired Poe to pen a detective story in the first place.

  Born in London, Burton tried to establish a monthly magazine before drifting into the theater. At the age of thirty he left an unsuccessful marriage, abandoning his wife and son to make a new life in the United States, working as an actor and manager in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

  In 1837 he founded Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia, publishing “The Secret Cell” in the September issue, and in 1839 he employed Poe as an editor. The two did not get along: Burton disliked the harshness of Poe’s literary reviews, and he may have written a particularly negative review of Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” Burton tried to sell the magazine without telling Poe, who responded by planning to launch a competing publication of his own. Burton fired Poe in 1840 and sold the magazine, using the money to renovate his theater—he had never entirely given up the stage—before returning to work as a writer and editor.

  While a police officer rather than a private detective, Burton’s hero L— is skilled in the art of disguise and enjoys the company of an admiring narrator, as Holmes does. Instead of the Baker Street Irregulars, he has a resourceful wife with a talent for eliciting information, and instead of Lestrade, he can call upon the services of a friendly magistrate and a number of subordinate officer
s. He needs all of these resources—and a modicum of luck—when the search for a missing person leads to the discovery of a large and disturbing criminal enterprise.

  I’ll know no more—the heart is torn

  By views of woe we cannot heal;

  Long shall I see these things forlorn,

  And oft again their griefs shall feel,

  As each upon the mind shall steal;

  That wan projector’s mystic style,

  That lumpish idiot leering by,

  That peevish idler's ceaseless wile,

  And that poor maiden’s half-form’d smile.

  While straggling for the full-drawn sigh!

  — Crabbe.

  About eight years ago, I was the humble means of unravelling a curious piece of villainy that occurred in one of the suburbs of London; it is well worth recording, in exemplification of that portion of “Life” which is constantly passing in the holes and corners of the Great Metropolis. My tale, although romantic enough to be a fiction, is excessively common-place in some of the details—it is a jumble of real life; a conspiracy, an abduction, a nunnery, and a lunatic asylum, are mixed up with constables, hackney-coaches, and an old washerwoman. I regret also that my heroine is not only without a lover, but is absolutely free from the influence of the passions, and is not persecuted on account of her transcendent beauty.